Psychological safety doesn’t come from having enough risk-aversion strategies to hide behind, but from having learned the value of being daring and experimenting with bravery for the good of the company. While coming from the same need for security, “nobody got fired for buying IBM” ultimately stands for ill-understood, self-reinforcing prophecy, not workplace psychological safety. There is no belief in a pay-off to taking a risk and nowhere near enough belief in one’s own self-worth, whereas there’s an overwhelming fear of the consequences of possible insuccess. The “IBM-buyers” don’t feel entitled or mandated to take what appears to be a risky decision on behalf of the company.Īs organizations are only as psychologically fit as their last employee, taking an honest look at this lack of empowerment is paramount.Ī lot of it comes from a lack of self-confidence that long-term employees of large organizations often develop in time as a result of a myriad of institutional factors such as lack of exposure to the wider market lack of incentive to keep learning and developing lack of valuable personalized KPIs existent or perceived lack of inside and outside opportunities and above all, an overall belief that taking any chances has a higher likelihood of failure than success and that failure, irrespective of causes will be attributed to the employee and it will be terminal. Organizations everywhere (and banks in particular) need employees to find themselves at “NASA-janitor-meeting-JFK” level of the heart where they feel their every move contributes to the wellbeing of a company they love. Truly willing to be daring enough to examine “what it takes” and “go there”. Now more than ever, we need employees who feel like they are truly part of the journey, as invested in a big brand’s every move to success as the first employees of a start-up. Part of what causes “IBM-buyers” to shy away from alternative decision making is a general sense of “I don't own this place, l just work here”.Ĭreating a sense of real investment in the organization is simultaneously increasingly difficult and increasingly necessary. One of the reasons this still exists as a shield against negative consequences, is that while the same people who would be “buying IBM” are the segment of the workforce with most opportunity and mobility, they remain industrial-era-recession-level terrified of the alternative of having to change employment. The answer is largely a function of the size of the company, the project, and the purse, but it would still make for a fascinating journey in workplace psychology if we could ever find out what level it originated at and where it is still held today.
#HOPEFULLY I DONT GET FIRED TODAY. SOFTWARE#
Is it the developer lead asked to do the comparison between IBM and another piece of software who suggested the latter who would go? Is it the head of procurement that approved it? Is it the P&L holder or really the executive who had nothing to do with the actual decision, but whose head would ultimately roll when the project proved a failure? It would be interesting to examine who this motto truly pertains to. Over the past 30 years, IBM, as any other company has changed considerably and the software and services they provide are in no discernable fashion by default better than the competitors big and small, or even the opensource alternatives and as such, it’s nothing but sad that this hasn’t registered with parts of the market (it certainly has registered in places like China if you look up their history with the company) and that the phrase still reverberates today. They -along with most everyone else in technology- would also admit that is no longer the case. Leaving aside the consideration of why that should ever be anything but the norm in business in general, if we speak to IBMers that have been around “in the olden days”, they will confirm the conscientious stance was not PR but a strongly held internal belief of only engaging when they believed they could over-deliver. In other words, they were supremely dedicated to providing quality service to their clients.
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